Engage and retain your customers: Announcing Watson Virtual Agent

You launched a Facebook page, then half of your base moved to Snapchat. You added an IVR front-end to your call center but your customers figured out how to bypass it. Customers want fast, personalized service but they want it on their terms.

In fact, according to a 2016 IBM survey, 65% of Millennials surveyed don’t want to deal with a live agent at all. Using chatbots or virtual agents (digital agents that interact with customers in English and other languages via speech or text ) on the front line of customer service, is something that many organizations, large and small, have been experimenting with to address this. Some of those trials have been more successful than others, as the limitations of current technology and the difficulties inherent in training and implementing those bots has become clearer.

Today we are announcing Watson Virtual Agent, a cognitive, conversational self-service engine. This virtual agent engages with your customers to tackle typical customer service questions, interacting in a conversational, personalized manner to respond to requests through any channel.

Watson Virtual Agent understands common customer service queries from day one because it has been pre-trained on frequently occurring customer intents, or the true purpose of the many different ways that a customer can ask a question. For example, intents to do with store information, payment requests and account management. Watson has been trained to answer these questions and through our configuration panel, you can quickly tailor Watson’s responses with no complicated coding or scripting required.

Deep analytics

The Engagement Metrics Analytics dashboard allows you to understand more about the interactions your customers have had with your virtual agent. The dashboard shows visualizations of key data relating to the number of interactions, length of interactions, subject matter and more. You can also export data for sharing with other colleagues or combining with other tools.

Publishing your virtual agent

Putting Watson to work is simple. Once you have configured your virtual agent, you can deploy it fast. We publish a snippet of code that can be easily embedded into your application or website and it’s ready to go.

A SAAS solution

Because Watson Virtual Agent is delivered as a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, there’s no installation required, and our continuous development process means that we develop and share new content on a frequent basis. Watson’s abilities therefore expand over time and these improvements are pushed out to you as soon as they’re ready.

The world is not the same place in the morning when you get to work as it was yesterday when you left, but if you have a reliable AI solution, you can turn confusion into insight. Data is growing at a rate faster than ever, and it’s difficult for our human brains to keep up […]

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